George Moore has said, somewhere, that the entrance of a woman into a room is like a delicious change of light. And Moore, as everyone knows, is by way of being an expert about women; he is an amateur of women, an amorist. All this being so, his words ought to carry the weight of an authority with them. And in order to demonstrate the truth of his assertion, one has but to note the effect of Jessica Pomeroy upon Valentine Morley.
The entrance of Jessica upon Val’s life had just the effect Moore has described; he had an inner change of light. His inner light, to that time, had been a little drab tinged with blue—a delicate blue, to be sure, but blue nevertheless; blue, conceded to be the color dedicated to dejection and moroseness, ennui and weariness. Somehow, just the sight of Jessica, the knowledge of being in the same world with her, had changed his coloring. His inner coloring, the subconscious coloring that Freud might have understood in him, had changed to a pinkish, old-rose tint. Suns were shining, birds were singing their fool heads off, the Giants and Yankees were winning, prohibition didn’t prohibit so terribly much—the golf course of Life was nothing but a long, wide, rolling, undulating, closely cropped fairway, with not a bunker or a ditch or a sand trap, not a hint of hazard or rough. This was the effect of Jessica upon Val.
These were the things of which Val thought as he jerked his way back to the hotel in his antiquated, horseless bus. A week ago life had been nothing but a dull round to him; getting up, getting through the day and evening in a half-hearted fashion, going to bed again, and repeat ad lib and ad infinitum. That was life. Now things were different. There was a zest to living, a purpose in Life—he expressed it in capital letters. And all because a girl had hair that had a hint of color in its depths . . . and those eyes! . . . this was good for another fifteen minutes with Val, until he pulled up in front of the hotel.
He found Eddie Hughes standing outside the hotel, talking animatedly to what was obviously a newly, found friend. Eddie spotted him as soon as his car drew up at the curb; asking his acquaintance to wait, he hastened to speak to Val.
It appeared that the friend was not a new friend at all; it was a friend he had known in the army. There had been talk of going to the moving pictures in Hampton, the “supper show,” which finished about, nine or thereabouts. He would like to go, but only if there was no need of him this evening.
This rather fitted in with Val’s ideas; although he had intended to take Eddie along, yet there seemed to be no real reason for doing so. There seemed no possible chance of danger; and if there was, Val rather had an idea he could handle the situation by himself. He told Eddie in a few words how to get out to the Pomeroy place, and what he intended to do to-night. Eddie was to follow him after the show, and wait for him at Jessica’s cottage.
“You’re really going out to that there haunted house to-night?” asked Eddie.
“Yes ” said Val. “Why?”
Eddie’s brow clouded. Perhaps he had been a little too swift with the moving picture stuff, anyway. Here was something that promised more fun than images on a canvas sheet, and he wasn’t going to be in it. It was exasperating.
“I might try to get off from this pitcher stuff,” he suggested, “if you’ll just wait a minute⸺”
“No, that’s all right, Eddie,” said his employer benevolently. “I want you to have a good time. Go right ahead and enjoy yourself.”
“I know,” muttered Eddie, “but I think I might—”
“No, give yourself no concern over that,” said his employer with magnanimity. “Take a little holiday for a couple of hours,” he suggested with a touch of unholy and malicious joy. He knew that the heart of Eddie was aching to come along to the haunted house—and now that he had decided on going without Eddie he intended to stick to it.
“All right, sir,” replied Eddie, turning towards his friend with resignation in his eye. “But if you get killed I don’t want you to lay the blame on me⸺”
“That’s all right,” said Val gravely. “If I get killed I’ll never say a word about the matter to you. Run along now, and enjoy yourself.”
“It looks like rain,” Eddie predicted gloomily, examining the sky judicially. “Perhaps⸺”
“Oh, beat it!” snapped Val. “I’m going in to dinner.”
There was no dressing for dinner, of course; primarily, because Val intended to hasten right back to Jessica’s place after dinner, and a dinner jacket was not suitable wear for use among the spiders and dust of the old Pomeroy home; secondarily, because Val had no dinner jacket with him.
Val regaled himself with a fine old southern dinner, running the gauntlet of waffles with real honey, fried chicken as only a Virginia chef can negotiate it, sweet potatoes, a salad for which the chef was famous, and coffee that was percolated on the table, in front of his eyes, until it was of just the desired amber shade. This he mixed with cream that had seen a cow recently. All in all, it was a meal to remember, not because of its complexity and its frills—it had few of those, and it was as simple a meal as one could wish—but because of the thorough wizardry of the cooking and the punctilious efficiency of the service.
Val pondered a little on the presence of Teck with Jessica when he last saw her, but he dismissed the matter as being, at the moment, inconsequential. There was a score to settle with Teck, and he intended to attend to the settling thereof himself, but there was nothing to worry about to-night. He was with Jessica, to be sure, but Val knew now that Jessica hated him and loathed him, whereas his own, Val’s, star was in the ascendant, as he jubilantly admitted to himself. Jessica was in no danger from the man to-night, Val decided. Surely she would not ask him to stay to dinner; he would leave early, and that evening the field would be open for Val and Jessica to pay that visit to the old Pomeroy house.
He planned all this, laying it out to his satisfaction; he decided on what he would say to Jessica and what she would say to him; he plotted out the exact setting of the stage when he finally found the treasure; her words of gratitude, which he would wave aside lightly, as though it were a small thing he had done. It was pleasant to smoke one’s cigar like this and to think these thoughts here, in the light, after a satisfying dinner.
The sky was overcast and lowering when Val started out after dinner. The street lamps in Old Point Comfort dispelled the gloom but faintly, and in a few minutes he was out of their range altogether, swallowed up in the dark gloom of a chilly Virginia night.
At Hampton he stopped, sought out a hardware store, and bought a small lantern. He figured he would need it at the old house. He had it filled carefully with oil, saw that the wick extended the proper distance, and was on his way in a very short time.
Down the winding paths to the Pomeroy place he chugged. He saw the lights of the cottage long before he came close to it, and it came to him suddenly that perhaps Teck was still there. How could he tell whether Teck had already gone, or not? That being the case, it occurred to him that he had better come on the scene as quietly as possible. He did not want Teck to know that he was here to-night; if he intended to work without interruption, it would be better that Teck did not know. Certainly the handless one would take means to prevent his searching for the treasure. Teck would not give up so easily as that.
A quarter of a mile from the cottage Val parked his car by the side of the road, well out of sight, and continued on foot. Silently he crept up to the cottage, merging with the shadows on the road, carrying his unlighted lantern in one hand. At the cottage Val crept up to one of the lighted living room windows and glanced in through the light curtains.
He had done well in making his entrance upon the scene a silent one, because three figures sat in the living room. In one corner sat Elizabeth, the old woman, dozing over a book. On a chair next to the table, where the lamp’s circle of light fell on him revealingly, sat Teck. The conversation, Val could see, was desultory. Jessica glanced once at her wrist watch, a little troubled, while Val looked, and he knew of what she, was thinking. Teck sat there, suave, smiling, and a little bland, carrying the bulk of the conversation. Outside crouched Val, a dark figure making one with the still darker background.
Far off, at the other end of the track, Val could see a darker blotch against the sky, which he was pretty sure was the old Pomeroy house, the one he was to explore this night. The track showed, a little lighter in the gloom than the surrounding country. Around Val twittered the night life of the countryside, and somewhere in the rear of the house a mandolin rang into being, shattering the night softly with an old sea song, in the quavering voice of old Germinal, who had followed the sea in his youth.
So set down yo’ licker an’ dat gal fum off yo’ knee,
Fo’ de wind, she come ter say,
“Yo’ mus’ take me wile yo’ may.
Does yo’ go ter Mothah Carey!
(Walk her down ter Mothah Carey!)”
Oh, we’s gwine ter Mothah Carey whah she feeds dem chicks at sea!
Val smiled at the incongruity of the song, a song which should be roared by the combined chorus of the forecastle; Germinal squeaked and quavered, accompanied by the clicking of his mandolin, in a great deal less than the proper volume and fullness of voices.
Yet it combined with the darkness, and the yellow shaft of light which streamed from the window, to produce in Val a feeling that he was enveloped by this dark Virginia night; he shivered slightly in the somewhat chilly wind; he watched for a moment or two longer, and slipped back into the shadows, one with the night.
The question was one of expediency. What was to be done? While one could not always be sure, because there was such a variable quality about Teck, yet it appeared to Val as though Teck were planted there for the whole evening—perhaps even the night. There was something so solid, so permanent, about the way he sat on that couch. Something so smug about the way he regarded Jessica when he caught her glancing at her wrist watch; probably he had made up his mind that if he himself was not going to hunt for old Pomeroy’s treasure that night, Jessica would not, either. As to Val, he probably had not given a thought to him to-night, not believing that Val would start an independent hunt of his own.
So Val pondered, every once in a while glancing in at the window again to see whether or not Teck was planted as firmly as before. He was. Always. As he slipped back into the shadows, he thought he heard a movement behind him, slight as the soughing of the wind through the trees, yet distinguishable from the other surrounding night noises.
He whirled instantly, but could make out nothing in the blackness that enveloped him. He shrugged his shoulders and called himself a fool for being as jumpy as a child during a ghost story. It had been just the movement of one of the bushes. He settled into the shadow of the lee of the bush and stayed there for a few moments.
Somehow, the feeling that he was not alone would not down. Of course it had been the rubbing of the twigs in the wind, but Val felt that perhaps it had not been. Suppose it had only seemed like that. Suppose . . .
He strained his eyes into the night on all sides of him. Softly, silent as a cat, he padded around two sides of the house. He could see nothing. To him on the wings of the night came the song of Germinal:
Ah hopes your satisfied,
Yer dragged muh down an’ down until
Tha heart within muh dah-eye-d. . . .
Val went back to his post at the window. There was no change in the position of the three within. Elizabeth was still dozing, Jessica was attempting to appear unconcerned at the passing of time, and Teck was a Gibraltar of permanence. Val could hear nothing of what was being said, but he could see that the handless one was doing most of the talking. He was arguing in his quiet, emotionless fashion, his ugly scar standing out redly against the pasty skin of his face, and his slit shaped eyes gleaming at Jessica purposefully and—Val thought—evilly.
Jessica was slightly paler than usual; he could see that Teck was trying to argue her into something, some course of action, perhaps; he could see, too, that Jessica was standing firm in her refusal, and would continue to stand firm. His impulse, of course, was to enter and put an end to the conversation. That, however, would scarcely be in accordance with the plans. He considered that it was just as well that Teck did not know he was there. It was a trump in the game—the value of surprise was in it. He decided to save it to the end—to play his trump only if necessary. At present, whatever Teck was saying, he seemed harmless enough, in spite of his great weight and strength. A man with no hands cannot do much upon the offence, quoth Val to himself.
And yet, this man had an uncanny way of doing things that you might scarcely have thought possible. Val was practically certain that it was Teck himself who had struck him down in the vestibule of Jessica’s house; though he had no actual proof, he was equally certain that it was Teck who had done poor old Mat Masterson to death. It was the kind of job that he believed Teck himself would do.
How were these things done? Val gave it up for the moment, yet he promised himself that these were things he would find out, riddles he would unravel before he and this giant monstrosity were through with each other. This man was a power for evil in the life of Jessica; even if it had not been for the personal assaults committed on his person by Teck and his men, Val would have felt privileged to interfere. His love for Jessica gave him that right. He intended to settle with Teck for good—and he intended to do that in the immediate future.
That was his reason for not handing over the man to the police. There were too many loose ends. There were things he had to discover; unexplained incidents that he wished to explain to his own satisfaction before he took such a decisive action. He wished, for instance, to know why the books were so important. He wanted to find out their secret from Teck—the secret that made even murder seem justifiable to the handless one. What was it these books held? Was it the secret to the treasure? Perhaps—but Val had looked through them carefully, and could find nothing.
Was it possible that Teck was as much at sea concerning the whereabouts of the hidden money—if any, Val added—as he was? These were things for him to find out, Val decided. If Teck knew where the money was—if he had wrested the answer from the books—was it not likely that he would have gone at once about the business of getting possession of it, instead of sitting here with Jessica, looking as though he intended to stay the entire evening? Val thought it quite likely that this was so; that Teck did not yet know much about the hiding place of the Pomeroy fortune. He admitted, however, that Teck might be in possession of a rather shrewd idea of its whereabouts. Otherwise, why should he have been in such a hurry to get down here?
Val realized that he was dangerous to Teck—that is, that Teck must consider him dangerous. For Teck had not only to find the hidden wealth, he had to get away with it. And he would not be able to do that while Val was there, watching his every move. The money was not Teck’s, but once in his possession, away from the scene—in another state—perhaps in another country—it would be an almost impossible thing to get it away from him.
With Val in this affair, however, Teck would not get away so easily, and he knew it. His problem was to eliminate Val, thought Val as he watched through the window; that is what he would do if he were Teck, and he gave the handless one credit for thinking in the same common sense way. With only Jessica to reckon with, Teck might readily make his getaway—perhaps even induce her to carry out her promise as to marrying him; with Val in the running he stood to lose both the money and the girl. For this affair was different from the usual buried treasure hunt, where the gold belongs to the first person who turns it up. It was wealth the ownership of which was established. Decidedly, Teck would be at a disadvantage as long as Val was on the scene.
These thoughts coursed through Val’s head swiftly as he stepped back from the window and merged again with the shadows alongside the road. He had run into a trap of Teck’s in New York; then it was excusable, because he had no reason for thinking that Teck was laying plans to trip him up. But having had that valuable lesson, and knowing the cogent reasons Teck had for desiring his elimination, Val decided that it behooved him to watch his step and to take nothing for granted.
He was watching Teck. How did he know that one of Teck’s creatures was not now watching him? He conceded that he did not know, but to satisfy himself he examined the ground round about him thoroughly again. He could find no sign of anybody watching him.
Well, perhaps Teck really did not expect anything to happen to-night. A man can’t always be making plans for your murder, you know.
The thing that concerned Val most at present was the appointment he had had with Jessica to go over the old Pomeroy house. It appeared to him that she would be unable to do anything about it to-night; Teck showed no intention of taking his departure. She would certainly say nothing to him about what she wanted to do; she could hardly ask him to take his departure, because that might make him suspicious that all was not well.
All that being so, Val thought that perhaps he might run through the Pomeroy house himself. When could he find a better time? Teck was occupied. As long as he was with Jessica he could not be watching Val. And all Val wanted was time to go over the house swiftly—to determine, if he could, the possibility of treasure being hidden there. It would not take long.
He took a last glance through the lighted window. Teck was planted as solidly as before. Jessica was silent, determined. Elizabeth was sound asleep, her book having slipped off her lap to the floor.
“Well, here goes,” Val said to himself, picking up his lantern.
In the shadow of the bushes, he made his way off into the direction of the gaunt old house. The plaintive voice of Germinal followed him down the road:
Near de end ob a joiney, too;
But it leaves er thought which am big an’ strong,
Wid er wish what am kin’ an’ true. . . .
A catlike figure detached itself from the solid black of the roadside and stared after the departing Val.